The Book of Two Ways

by Jodi Picoult

  When you fall out of love, it’s because you realize that you’re both broken.

  * * *

  —

  Why now? Why write, after twenty years? Why turn up like an unquiet ghost, chains in my hands, disturbing whatever peace you have convinced yourself you have?

  Because I’m running out of time.

  It is the one thing we never had, and I’m sorry to say it’s only gotten worse.

  I’m sick, my love. I’m sick, and as my body decays around me, all I have left is my mind. I have had many long hours in this bed to mull over it, and even if we were never meant to stay together, we were meant to be together. Even if we had to lose each other, we were meant to find each other. I would not have had my marriage or almost sixteen years with my son if not for you. I don’t think it could have gone any other way, and I don’t think it should have gone any other way. You are the catalyst, if not the product of the chemical equation. You belonged with her, and I belonged with him, but for a tiny flicker, we belonged to each other. I just couldn’t leave this world without telling you that you were the one, for me. The one I couldn’t shake and didn’t want to.

  By the time you are reading this, I’ll most likely be gone. But because you are reading this, I know that as long as you’re here, so am I.

  * * *

  —

  THE SICKER A person gets, the more equipment there is. Win’s bedside is cluttered with pill bottles, cups with straws, wipes to soothe her skin when she’s feeling hot. There is a stack of Chux—the absorbent pads we slip under the sheets as incontinence becomes an issue. The cane she used when I met her became a walker, and now a wheelchair. The commode in the bathroom is now a commode beside the bed.

  Win has her head turned toward the window. Felix has hung a bird feeder there, and juncos and squirrels and the occasional blue jay twitch nervously on its lip. “Is that a red leaf?” she asks.

  I lean closer so that I can look where she is looking. It’s summer, green as far as the eye can see.

  “I don’t think so. It’s too early for the leaves to turn.”

  She sighs, rolling onto her back. “I was hoping I’d make it to fall.”

  “Is that your favorite season?”

  “No, I hate it. Pumpkin spice is the work of Satan.” Win folds her hands across her stomach. “You know, people who are dying always talk about the things they’ll miss. A spring day. Orange Popsicles. Seeing your grandkids grow up. No one talks about the other stuff that you won’t: shoveling your driveway or doing your taxes or getting arthritis…or pumpkin spice. But here’s the kicker: I’m actually going to miss those, too.” Win glances at me. “It feels like there ought to be a word for that feeling. Something long and German, like schadenfreude. Or maybe your Ancient Egyptians had one.”

  There is a Middle Kingdom text called The Dispute Between a Man and His Ba, in which a man argues with his soul, saying he wants to commit suicide. The soul counters by saying that we don’t really know what happens after death, so why take that risk? The text doesn’t judge the man for wanting to kill himself—it’s not about going to hell, or sin, or even a warning. It’s about missing out on the enjoyment of life on earth.

  Win stretches out her hand, and I take it. Her bones are light and insubstantial. She is an hourglass, and there is so little sand remaining. “I have one regret, you know. That I didn’t get to meet you under better circumstances.”

  I feel a telltale prickle of tears in my eyes. “Win, it has been a joy getting to know you.”

  “I think we would have been friends,” she says.

  “I think we are friends.”

  She nods. “That’s why I want you to leave.”

  I look at her quizzically.

  “To deliver my letter.”

  I shake my head. “I promised you I would get it to Thane, but right now, you’re my priority.”

  “And I’m asking you to go now, to do this. I know it won’t change anything. But I think it’s going to be easier for me to…leave…knowing that he’s thinking of me.” Win’s sentence ends in a whisper. “I trust you, Dawn.”

  “But—”

  “You told me you’d make sure that whatever I wanted at the end, or needed, I’d have. I need this. I want this.”

  “Win,” I say clearly, carefully, “you may very well die while I’m off finding Thane.”

  “I’ll have Felix, here.”

  I nod, unable to speak for a moment. “I’ll make sure that my friend Abigail comes. She’s a hospice social worker.”

  “That would be good,” Win says. “For Felix, too.”

  I believe that there are five things we need to say to people we love before they die, and I give this advice to caregivers: I forgive you. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Goodbye. I tell them that they can interpret those prompts any way they like, and nothing will have been left unsaid.

  I forgive Win for making me do this.

  I hope she will forgive me for not being here, if she dies when I’m away.

  I thank her for showing me a piece of myself I’d forgotten.

  “I love you,” I tell her, pressing a kiss to her forehead.

  When I meet her gaze, she is crying, too. “Goodbye,” I say.

  She reaches up, which takes considerable effort, and holds on to my hand with both of her own, as if she, too, is having trouble letting go.

  From a desk drawer, I take the rolled canvas, with its art on one side and my cramped handwriting on the other. Tied with a piece of string, it looks like the papyrus scroll of the Book of Going Forth by Day.

  “Dawn?” Win’s voice reaches me as I am about to cross the threshold of the room. “I hope you find him.”

  “Thane? I will. I promise.”

  “Not mine,” she says. “Yours.”

  * * *

  —

  WHEN BRIAN COMES home from work, I am packing, and I have purchased a ticket to Heathrow. He sees me folding a change of clothes and underwear into a knapsack and goes still in the doorway. I realize he thinks I am leaving him.

  Again.

  “I’m going to London,” I explain. “For Win.”

  He sits on the edge of the bed. “Did she die, then?”

  “No. But I don’t think it will be long now. She asked me to deliver her letter now, instead of waiting.”

  Brian nods, pulling at a thread in our comforter.

  “I know you don’t want me to go,” I reply. “But I made a promise.”

  “A promise,” Brian repeats. “You made one to me, too, a long time ago.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Brian looks at me. “I found you looking at your old boyfriend online, but I didn’t run. You keep saying that I’m the problem, that it’s because of what I did or almost did, but I’m here. I’m sticking. I’m fighting for our marriage. You’re the one who keeps putting distance between us.” His voice breaks. “Jesus. Being with you is all I ever wanted. And being with me, for you, is torture.”

  “That’s not true. I love you.” I hesitate. “I can see us, twenty years from now, with wrinkles and white hair and grandchildren, all of it. I just don’t know how we get from here…to there.”

  He holds my palm between his hands, turning it over like he could divine my future. “I do. I’ll do whatever it takes to make you feel safe again. I’ll quit my job and move to a different university. I’ll go to counseling. We could take a vacation. Egypt—you could show me Egypt! Let’s go to Meret’s tennis matches together and be the loudest, most embarrassing parents. Let’s try to remember how to be us again.”

  I want to. I want to so badly that I ache. But I can’t figure out how to be us if I don’t know who I am.

  “It’s like déjà vu. The thing I’m most afraid of happening keeps actually happening,” Brian says. “E
very time you walk out that door, I think it’s the time you’re not coming back.”

  I don’t know what to say. The last time I ran away, I didn’t think I was coming back, either.

  Brian draws a shallow breath. “Do you think I don’t know that you settled?”

  “I didn’t settle,” I tell him. “I wound up exactly where I was supposed to wind up.”

  “Then don’t go.”

  Logic. Brian has always been able to wield it. He makes it seem so simple: stay here, and fight for the marriage. But I have to deliver Win’s letter.

  “I’m not saying you shouldn’t deliver it,” Brian adds, reading my thoughts. “I’m saying you shouldn’t deliver it right now.”

  “Sometimes the past matters more than the present,” I answer, and he lets go of my hand.

  We are saved from ourselves by Meret, who bounces into the bedroom, brandishing an envelope. “It’s back. It’s finally back!”

  Brian and I both instantly morph into normal, untroubled parents. “Genomia?” Brian guesses.

  “What’s Genomia?”

  Meret sits down between us. “The DNA test Dad got me for my birthday.”

  I vaguely remember her thanking Brian for the belated gift—but I hadn’t actually ever asked what the present was.

  “It’s supposed to tell you if you have tendencies for, like, celiac disease or high cholesterol or Alzheimer’s…or obesity,” Meret says. “I just thought it would be cool to see why I’m the way I am.”

  A girl who looks nothing like her parents, who is trying to find her place in the world. I meet Brian’s gaze over her head.

  “Well?” he says. “Time for the big reveal?”

  She tears open the envelope. “The first page is just ancestry,” Meret says. “But I already know I’m Irish and…”

  “Ninety-eight percent?” Brian looks at the pie chart on the paper. “That’s weird. Your grandma and grandpa were Ashkenazi Jews from Poland. What’s the margin of error for the test?”

  Always the scientist.

  Meret smirks. “Is now the time to tell me I’m adopted?”

  I stare at the pie chart and suddenly I can’t move. My blood, the same blood that runs in Meret’s veins, is sluggish. That nearly complete circle graph. British and Irish, ninety-eight percent.

  The marquess is my father. I’m merely an earl.

  All the way back to William the Conqueror, I’m afraid.

  English, Wyatt had said. Through and through.

  THERE’S AN EGYPTIAN myth in which Isis, hungry to get power from Re to give her own son, brings down the sun god by creating a poisonous snake out of his own spit. Re can’t fight it, because it’s part of him. That is how it feels when, the next day, I am working in the magazine and Wyatt comes in.

  I already know that Anya is leaving. I heard the Land Rover pulling away; I assumed that Wyatt was in it with her, driving her back to Cairo to make her flight.

  “I’m surprised to see you,” I say.

  He leans against one of the storage shelves. “Alberto had to go to Cairo to get some computer cable, so he offered to play chauffeur.”

  “He deserves a raise,” I say, turning my attention to a line of hieratic I’ve read four times.

  Wyatt comes closer, climbing up the scaffolding so that he is standing opposite me, the cavern of the coffin between us. “You’re angry.”

  “You said it yourself: I don’t have the right to be angry.” I look away from him. “I got your note. Or was that a parting gift?”

  I want to ask him what he said to Anya. And at the same time, I don’t want to know. Either way, I can’t see where we go from here.

  “Dammit, Olive. I really want to talk to you.”

  “Then talk.”

  “Not here.” Wyatt climbs down from the scaffolding and stands at the base of the coffin, his hand extended, like a knight rescuing a maiden from a tower. “Let’s go for a drive.”

  * * *

  —

  IN 2003, ON the day that we found the rock dipinto, everyone else living in the Dig House had taken the day off. We were alone because they’d gone to visit Tell el-Amarna, the city where Akhenaton ruled with his queen, Nefertiti. It is only eight miles from us, thirty minutes, and it’s remarkable that I have never actually been there, because Akhenaton is one of the most fascinating kings in ancient Egypt. A New Kingdom pharaoh from the 18th Dynasty, he is known for two things: for being the father of Tutankhamun, and for changing religion during the course of his reign.

  There’s no question that deities—plural—were important to ancient Egyptians. Many Egyptian gods seemed to clot into threes or multiples of threes—from Atum, Shu, and Tefnut to Amun, Re, and Ptah; from Osiris, Isis, and Horus to the Ennead—the nine main deities worshipped at Heliopolis. Temples in Egypt were stages for processions. The Egyptians would have come out to watch, and after the gods had sucked up all the spiritual sustenance from the offerings, the literal food was given to the masses. Feast days then were like Christmas now.

  But when Akhenaton became king, he was the Grinch. He shut down the temples and the festivals. Instead of celebrating many gods, the Egyptians now had to celebrate one—the Aton, or sun disk—but Akhenaton wasn’t a monotheist. Instead, he inserted himself into theology, rounding out a new trilogy with himself and his royal wife, Nefertiti. Every day in Amarna, his shining golden city, there were festivals celebrating himself, his wife, and his daughters. He was accompanied by a military escort at all times. It is the only era in Egyptian history where there are representations of people bowing all the time to their king.

  He didn’t just cancel Christmas, though. He also canceled the afterlife. Although he was a New Kingdom pharaoh, his tomb—unlike the tombs in the Valley of the Kings—depicts no funerary rituals involving deities like Re and Osiris, because that would negate the concept of Akhenaton as a creator god. By definition, none of those other deities could exist yet.

  Wyatt and I are quiet on our way to Amarna. We stop first at the boundary stele, and then we continue to the necropolis.

  Wyatt has been here often. The guard knows him by sight and hands him the key so that we can explore on our own. As we descend into the Royal Tomb, I breathe in the sweet, smoky smell of bat guano. Immediately, I am drawn to the images on the walls, which are so different from the art at Deir el-Bersha or anywhere else in Ancient Egypt.

  Nefertiti and Akhenaton are hard to tell apart, because the figures do not look male and female. They are carved with elongated heads and round tummies, like the androgynous creator deities of Ancient Egypt. Their daughters are depicted, too, with the same alienesque heads and bellies, as if they, too, are eternally frozen at the moment of creation. In ritual temple scenes and private tombs, Akhenaton only portrayed his daughters, because a creator god could have as many female manifestations as he wanted, but the minute there was another male, the primordial clock was marching forward.

  Suddenly I understand why Wyatt has brought me here. Akhenaton tried to turn back time.

  “I didn’t say anything to Anya,” Wyatt confesses, “because I realized I had to speak to you, first.”

  Slowly, I face him. Wyatt stands in front of a sunrise scene depicting the royal family. His bright hair is exactly at the level of the sun disk, and for some reason, this makes me want to cry.

  “Stay with me, Olive. Publish this tomb with me. It’s not too late to start over.”

  It is so enticing to imagine that my life might have been different. That it still could be. But even as Wyatt reaches for my hand, I know what I have to tell him.

  Like Akhenaton, we can pretend. We can squirrel ourselves away in Deir el-Bersha, just the two of us. We can spin an epic story of how we were always meant to be. But also like Akhenaton, we will never really be able to go backward.

  I pull away, escaping into anothe
r chamber of the tomb as I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I can’t do this. I can’t walk away from him twice.

  I hear him come into the chamber behind me. I am in the room where Meketaton, the second daughter of Akhenaton, was buried. She died near the thirteenth or fourteenth year of her father’s reign. In the scene carved into the plaster on the walls, she is lying dead on a bier, as Akhenaton and Nefertiti hold each other and weep over her body. It is the most breathtaking portrait of grief.

  A second scene shows Akhenaton and Nefertiti again tearing out their hair in the act of mourning—nwn—in front of Meketaton’s standing mummy or statue. In this image, a baby is being led away by a nurse.

  When I was studying Egyptology, there was a lot of discussion about that baby, and who it might be. Some scholars said this proved Meketaton died in childbirth—and that the father was her own father, Akhenaton. But Meketaton died at age eleven, which was likely too young to be pregnant, even then. Some said the baby was Tutankhamun (then called Tutankhaton), although there was a question about a nearby determinative hieroglyph, which may show a seated female rather than a seated male. Others believed it was Meketaton herself, reborn under the healing rays of the Aton—the only way to show an afterlife, since there was no reference to Osiris or Re during Akhenaton’s rule.

  Although, academically, that baby is most likely Tutankhaton, I prefer the last analysis. Depending on your point of view, Akhenaton might be seen as a king, a narcissist, a visionary—but he was definitely a grieving father. In his heart, he would have wanted his daughter resurrected. To me, this is the only interpretation that hints at hope.

  When you have a child, you will do anything for her. You may not do it well, but you will kill yourself trying. You will trip over obstacles as you clear them out of her path. You will give her the choices you didn’t have.

  I move closer to the image of Meketaton’s parents, bent with sorrow. This is the remarkable part of history. As different as my life is now from that of an Egyptian pharaoh, I know what it feels like to wake up in a world where I have a daughter, and the next day, to face a future where I may not.